Some time back, a friend suggested that I submit my annotated edition of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe for consideration for the Katharine Briggs Award, the “annual book prize established by the Folklore Society to encourage the study of folklore, to help improve the standard of folklore publications in Britain and Ireland, to establish The Folklore Society as an arbiter of excellence, and to commemorate the life and work of the distinguished scholar Katharine Mary Briggs (1898-1980; Society president 1969-1972).”¹ I like big shiny things – an engraved goblet, no less – as much as the next manchild, so I looked into the submission process, but ultimately decided not to go through with it.

My sudden loss of interest is easily explained: the process requires that four copies of the book be submitted to the judges (a necessity I quite understand). My volumes are big and thick, and therefore expensive. What is more, because of where I live, I cannot get them at cost price; I have to pay full whack. To buy four copies of the whole three-volume edition, I would have to shell out more than £200, plus shipping, an expense I am unwilling to cover for no guaranteed return.

(Of course, I might win… yadda yadda yadda… exposure… blah blah blah…)

So now that The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe has been released (details here), I am now able to move on to the other publishing projects that I have in various stages of readiness.

First on the block are Regine Normann's legends, which I am calling Arctic Legends from Norway, a compendium of two volumes she published in the late 1920s. The legends are strange and unsettling, giving accounts of various preternatural intrusions in the lives of simple fisher farmers who populated the coastal regions of the north at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The manuscript is currently awaiting final editing, and the book will be published in the first half of the new year.

Next on the list is a volume of draug legends. Ostensibly the revenant of the sea dead who cannot be interred in consecrated ground, the draug haunts the seas, looking to cause calamity to those who travel by water, or perhaps it merely acts as a psychopomp to the fey (doomed to die). In either case, there are a good number of legends concerning these creatures, and my volume will bring them together in English for the first time.

The translation work is complete on most of these texts, and it shouldn't take too long to ready the work for editing.

Third is a volume of previously unpublished variants of Norwegian folktales. These incorporate some surprising elements, such as a gossiping squirrel running up and down the great linden tree in “Faithful and Unfaithful,” the troll confronting the billy-goats after they have eaten themselves fat, and even a shocking title – “The Princess Who Should Commit Fornication and Murder” (collected by Jørgen Moe, who later became a bishop).

The majority of these tales exist in sketches or even raw records, which means that I have to actually compose them so that they are readable and entertaining (the sine qua non of folk narratives). Although I have begun, there is still a way to go with this volume, and I dare not give it a deadline.

Lastly, there is the furtherance of my work on Asbjørnsen & Moe. I want to produce an ebook edition, and I want to release various selections of the folktales and legends – perhaps even a series of single tales. As the texts are already in publishable form, these projects will give me something to fiddle with while I am procrastinating.

There is enough work to fill my time, then, and it’ll all keep me off the streets until I’m done. Keep an eye out here for news of new releases.

It is now a mere ten days until the books are finally launched. I have written a brief introduction, and sent it off for the consideration of a journal I have faith in; but more than anything, I have been scrolling through the PDFs, looking for errors to correct, correcting them in the LaTeX sources, recompiling the PDF, and uploading it to Amazon. Sometimes more than once a day. All this activity will cease in a few days, however, as Amazon needs some quiet time to ready the book for printing on release day.

What will happen then, I am not sure. Will the books sell more than the copies I will buy for myself and the national repository library? I can’t tell. I do know that if the world were a fair one, there would be trumpets and a feast – a huge release party – for really, the publication of the first complete English edition of this national collection of folktales and legends, 180 years after the originals first began to appear, is a big deal, regardless of my involvement. But I don’t suppose 1. September will be any more remarkable for me than any other Sunday.

Once you have a book to release, accepted wisdom says to let people know by sending out press releases, writing promotional articles, and so on. While I am of course interested in letting people know about The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, I will not be trying to place any items in commercial publications. The reason for this is that, day by day, I lose confidence in the commercial publishing industry.

My latest disappointment is the deal between Informa, which owns Taylor & Francis, and Microsoft’s Al outfit. Basically, Informa is selling access to its authors’ research for a few million dollars. And it hasn’t asked its authors for permission because it doesn’t have to; if you publish through Taylor & Francis, you either have to pay through the nose to retain your copyright, or you have to transfer your copyright to them (for which they pay you nothing). Taylor & Francis is thus the very definition of a vampiric academic publisher, thriving to the tune of millions of dollars a year by sucking its authors dry of their potential living.

Now, Taylor & Francis publishes Folklore, the journal of the Folklore Society, which is one of the places I ought to place a notice or article announcing the availability of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe in English for the first time ever. Were I as cynical as the publisher, I suppose I still might do so, for wherever the copyright should end up, I would be writing for myself, and it’s not as if I need paying for such work. Yet the simple fact of the matter is that Taylor & Francis ought not to be able to conduct their business in such a predatory manner, and I refuse to tacitly condone their immoral, anti-social behaviour by visiting any of their publications – as donor or patron.

So what’s the alternative? I have this blog. I have Mastodon. I have Instagram. I have Facebook. And I have a couple of mailing lists. I shall put my notices up there. And to reach a broader audience than the aggregated thousand or so followers I have on these platforms, I shall write for publication in non-commercial organs. Details to follow.

When I was preparing and publishing Erotic Folktales from Norway (2017), the lack of LGBTQ+ presence in the collection was one of the things that bothered me. Having said that, one tale in that collection does take up feminist, queer, and even transgender themes; “The Girl Who Served as Soldier and Married the King’s Daughter” is a well-established folktale, having been “continuously told for about three thousand years,” and widespread, with variants having been collected from “locations as distant from one another as Chile, Norway, and Russia.”¹ So the folklore is out there, despite any attempt to suppress it.

Knowing this, I was surprised when, a few years ago, a Forbes article popped upon my radar, “Why This Charming Gay Fairytale Has Been Lost For 200 Years,” the point of which was to promote the work of Pete Jordi Wood, and his book, The Dog And The Sailor (originally self-published, 2020; Puffin, 2024). My surprise was not that this folktale existed, but that it had allegedly already been published – twice in Danish, but also in Finnish, Finnish-Swedish, Dutch, Frisian, and German – and then “lost.”² How does that even happen? So, since I can read Danish, I went looking for the sources. I found one of the published variants on my bookshelf, and discovered that it was not obviously queer.³ In fact, once the hero has saved the prince and the king, he decides to take the reward and leave the country.

I had difficulty locating the second variant, and eventually gave up looking, assuming the gay stuff must be in there.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Liz Gotauco published a video promoting Wood’s book, which has now been picked up by Penguin imprint Puffin. I thought I’d have another look for the second variant, and this time I found it on Google books.⁴ And again, I am puzzled that the folktale as published does not reference any homosexual love. In this variant, the hero refuses half the kingdom, travelling home to his parents instead, where “they lived so well together, and perhaps do so still, even today.”

What then is going on?

I decided to look more into the work of Pete Jordi Wood, and discovered that his considerable skill in self-promotion has probably taken him into the realms of misrepresenting his source material. He is able to do this because his sources are in languages other than English, which relatively few Anglos can verify. (I also wonder how Wood went about “translating variations of the story from Danish, German, Frisian, and others.” Is he a polyglot? We deserve to be informed, if we are to accept the account of his method.) Puffin, which has also picked up Tales From Beyond the Rainbow, Wood’s collection of ten LBGTQ+ tales, is probably most forthright: “Pete Jordi Wood has combed through generations of history and adapted ten unforgettable stories” (my emphasis).

Assuming the rest of Wood’s account is more or less true (and however would he have found these Danish tales, unless he had waded through Thompson?) I think it probable that he has found ten folktales that are ripe for queer readings, then retold the stories from that perspective. Only this and nothing more.

In my (white, hetero, middle-age, middle-class) opinion, the misrepresentation of the material serves to undermine Wood’s achievement in writing and publishing these stories. He could stand forth as a modern, proudly gay Hans Christian Andersen, writing bold new fairy tales for his people, who sorely deserve to meet themselves in literature. Instead, he has decided to downplay his involvement, claiming that he has uncovered something “ancient.” Yet perhaps it is thus more difficult to summarily dismiss the stories as merely “gay.”